A rewriting logic approach to operational semantics

We show how one can use rewriting logic to faithfully capture (not implement) various operational semantic frameworks as rewrite logic theories, namely big-step and small-step semantics, reduction semantics using evaluation contexts, and continuation-based semantics. There is a one-to-one correspondence between an original operational semantics and its associated rewrite logic theory, both notationally and computationally. Once an operational semantics is defined as a rewrite logic theory, one can use standard, off-the-shelf context-insensitive rewrite engines to “execute” programs directly within their semantics; in other words, one gets interpreters for free for the defined languages, directly from their semantic definitions. Experiments show that the resulting correct-by-definition interpreters are also reasonably efficient.